Up terribly early, well 7:30 or so and down to start using the YHA's Internet shop. There were a few people in before us but we squeezed in and started dealing with emails. After the best part of an hour -- it's shocking, isn't it, that someone as ingrained with computers as myself still takes twenty minutes to compose an email, perhaps I need lessons -- I realised we couldn't use the YHA's computers. Their gateway wasn't FTP aware. It's at this point that my mind starts wondering why I didn't stay up late one (more) night at Appletree Cottage and extend my Java/JSP journal code to allow all the editing and uploading to be done through a web site. Naively, I have assumed that being able to FTP files around and edit them locally is de facto. It isn't. People assume, not unreasonably, that your web usage extends to Hotmail and friends and catching up on the sports score. I'm too used to thinking of the Internet as the TCP/IP pipe out of the back of the box. I feel they should advertise Web access rather than Internet access. Can you guess how many cafes have had an SSH client?
Having determined that the YHA was NG (a Japanese technical term meaning [specifically] the opposite of OK) we bought some dive computers online from a UK shop [shockingly, the UK is selling them cheaper than anywhere else bar that blokey at Male duty free] and will have them spirited to Mark's where we'll pick them up in a week or so. Upstairs, I submitted myself to a 2.5mm (allegedly) haircut. Curiously, my fallen locks were very dark, not the expected bleached affairs. We booked ourselves, on my insistence, on a Barrosa [sic] Valley wine tour tomorrow, Wolf Blass included. Should be good. Kangaroo Island looks like an expensive ticket.
We wandered down the road to the DIMIA offices for Helen to, very promptly, get her Working Holiday Maker (WHM) visa -- not that she's shown any inclination to do any of the W bit. [Presumably my application was somewhere in the building but you're advised not to pester them.] The Australian experience is beginning to follow a traditional F-Plan Budget (in remarkably rapid order the daily spend becomes negative) before which that attitude [of not working] must change. So say I, anyway.
We dropped back into a travel shop offering 2 [Internet] hours for AU$6 which turned out [after we'd done our two hours] to be AU$6 per hour as we weren't in between the unspecified hours (is it legal to do that?) so we're another AU$24 down. We trail through town looking for cheap films, tapes, batteries and journals. In Woolworths, a food store down under as well as cheap tat, I spotted exercise books, 128 pages, 18c each. Wow, that's cheap. The next size up, 240 pages was an unpayable 67c or something. Then Helen spotted the 64 page books were selling for 6c each. So I bought three. The girl at the checkout blindly scanned them through before doing a double take. Yes, 18c for three exercise books (about 6p). Australians round to a 5c so it actually cost me 20c... Off in a corner we found the cheapest films in town, then I "struck" a deal and bought five Sony miniDV tapes for AU$10 a shot. All good work so[?] we were rudely chucked out of the Indian (they were closed [it was 3:30] but the owner hadn't told the hapless waiter) and had an adequate lunch of pizza and lasagne.
It was quite late now (5-ish) but we went for a pre-pay AU$4 per hour deal in another cafe with noisy casino games rattling all around. After we had had a late night cakey (I'm not sure it does my figure any good) in a nearby cafe where I would suggest the waitress was chosen for her looks rather than any academic achievement. I had baked cheesecake which was pleasant enough but a bit heavy. It certainly didn't give me a queasy hot flush like the pizza at lunch time. There's a running gastro-enteritis story in the news at the moment which I mulled over as my stomach gurgled.
Adelaide YHA, Adelaide S34.92636 E138.59451 Elev. 26m
Copyright 2003 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.